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IFOA Blog

Valentine’s Day is approaching so the International Festival of Authors wants to help you with your writer’s block. For those special people in your life for whom a convenience store card just won’t suffice, look no further than to these poetic lines below. From poets both modern and classic, here is some prose to quote in your love letters, or to inspire verses of your own.

The International Festival of Authors (IFOA) is proud to take part in Harbourfront Centre’s Kuumba 2018: the longest-running Black History Month celebration in Toronto. On Wednesday, February 7 we’ll host a thought-provoking discussion about writing and authorship, and opportunities and impediments to success in the book industry. The conversation will include authors Simone Dalton, Rinaldo Walcott and Whitney French, and will be moderated by CBC Toronto journalist Dwight Drummond, and hosted by David Bradford.

Simone Dalton

Rinaldo Walcott

Whitney French

Dwight Drummond

Be sure to explore the work of our featured authors before this special event:

The IFOA has had the pleasure of featuring numerous voices that honour the heritage, traditions and culture of Black communities here in Canada and across the globe. In honour of Black History Month, we’ve selected ten Black authors from the IFOA archives whose work we invite you to read this February, and all year round.

Michael Mirolla discusses writers who’ve influenced him and why he enjoys writing short stories in our Five Questions series. Mirolla will be launching his new short story collection, The Photographer in Search of Death, on Tuesday, January 30th at 6:30 pm with fellow Exile Editions author Martha Bátiz (Plaza Requiem).

IFOA: In a recent interview with Christine Cowley, you referred to the collection as speculative fiction. Tell us a bit about how The Photographer In Search of Death fits the description?

Michael Mirolla: I see “speculative fiction” as a description that encompasses a number of fictions (magical realism, surrealism, meta-fiction, science fiction). What they have in common is the idea that they are creating worlds rather than simply inhabiting them. Thus we get “what ifs” rather than “whats”.

They are also fictions of ideas rather than simply interactions between humans. To me, the best of these are those that can combine ideas with human interactions. That is, thoughts with a heart. I hope that, in a small way, The Photographer works towards achieving that aim and thus can fit under the speculative fiction umbrella.(more…)

The Delegate Programme is an opportunity for local authors and journalists to enrich the level of discussion at select events throughout the International Festival of Authors. David Bradford—author of Call Out and contributor to The Unpublished City—wrote about his experience as an IFOA 2017 delegate and for him, it turned the reader-writer relationship into a tangible experience.

“Every time I failed at something,” Eileen Myles told the Brigantine Room audience over Skype, “I could write.” It’s an old, truthful thing Andre Alexis and Kia Corthron seemed to recognize, one which I know well from my better nights, as well as my worst ones.

In a room full of honest-to-God readers, though, I found myself wondering how well they may have recognized Myles’s sentiment for themselves. I wondered how they might connect it with their own failures, and their own reach for that personal thing that wouldn’t let them down—how often that something might have been in the words of others. It reminded me that we writers all started, and hopefully remain first and foremost, readers. That often what we write begins with something we read—out of an impulse to look in a book for something we’ve failed to find elsewhere.

The Delegate Programme is an opportunity for local authors and journalists to enrich the level of discussion at select events throughout the International Festival of Authors. Alexandra Grigorescu—author of Cauchemar—wrote about her experience as an IFOA 2017 delegate and for her, a panel on research caught her attention.

I’ve been attending the International Festival of Authors for years. First, as a student enamoured with the writing life, then as a writer looking for pointers, then as a giddy participant, and now as a delegate. I played against my genre-loving type and chose a disparate set of panels: Keep It Short, The Lives of Underdogs, and Writing an Informed Story. Of these, the last one resonated most with me.

Deborah Dundas’ thoughtful questions took the audience behind the scenes of three distinct worlds and the facts that grounded their authors’ flights of fancy. What inspired me most was the way these three writers—Helen Humphreys, Claire Cameron and Roberta Rich—all began with a germ of an idea.